thus spake Thor Lancelot Simon on Sep 4, 2006, 11:00 PM:
>> Um. What "secret" contract? Marc Tooley asked us to post it two
>> days ago, and we promptly did.
We're referring to the secret agreements Martin Huseman has already
confirmed exist:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/09/04/0001.html
"This is not always a sensible. Part of the non disclosure is that I can
not quote the realy good examples (which did a great service to the
comunity,
but required TNF signing a contract, not all developers involved)."
So what secret contract did TNF sign with Wasabi, and if it wasn't with
Wasabi, who was it with?
>> [...] > Ask yourself this: there are approximately 400 members of the >> NetBSD
>> Foundation, developers of the NetBSD project. Do you really
>> believe that if dreadful things like you're asking about were going
>> on, you wouldn't be hearing about it from them? You say above that
>> "'anonymous' disclosure of evidence of things 'hidden' that should
>> in fact be known isn't ridiculously difficult" -- think that
>> through, then, and draw your own conclusion.
As Martin already pointed out, "not all developers involved." How many
developers were involved? Why were those ones chosen? With whom were
these agreements with and what code was committed to the tree as a
result (and by extension, what code has _not_ been committed to the tree
as a result)?
Without full disclosure of these agreements it is impossible to
determine if the NetBSD source tree is legal. We, as users and
developers not included in these secret agreements, have no idea if the
code in the tree came directly from the legal owners of the code or
through some "secret" agreement by people that did not own the code. We
have no idea if continuing to use NetBSD will leave us liable in case
the code turns out to be illegally obtained.
And please don't expect us to simply accept the word of TNF's lawyers.
We highly doubt they will actually be available to defend us or our
clients (and the lawyers will no doubt claim they had no idea about the
illegal actions taken by developers and TNF).
There can be no secrecy, whether in source code, corporate agreements,
or blobs, in an open source and free operating system. TNF needs to
turn over the books and documents to put some sunshine into these dark
activities, and TNF needs to resign effective immediately, while new
elections for core need to be implemented - and this time make it open
to all, developers _and_ users.
wbr,
--
Timo Schoeler | http://riscworks.net/~tis | timo.schoeler@riscworks.net
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Frankie says: Relax